Mystory – Page 3 – Konsult Experiment

WIDE IMAGE 2

2) Childhood Memory: Einstein’s Themata.

A heuristic rule is: any hermeneutics may become heuretics. Holton developed the Image of Wide Scope as hermeneutic, a mode of analysis and interpretation of the completed careers of productive people. The gambit of mystory shifts focus to the thematic, to discovery, as a rhetoric to generate a hypothetical wide image. Since the wide image is fully formed by the time students reach college, the mystory assumes that it may be composed and designed speculatively. One feature that recurs through these biographical studies of creative people is the importance of a scene of memory from childhood. Prototype is Albert Einstein, studied in depth by Holton, and we will refer to his history as a template to test for ourselves. It is possible with completed careers to observe the correspondence between the childhood scene and the disciplinary invention (between the compass and the physics of electromagnetism).

We can go back even further when searching for the point where the thematic commitment to the continuum was formed. It is well known that as a child of four or five, Einstein experienced what he called a wonder when his father showed him a simple magnetic pocket compass. It was an experience to which Einstein often referred. His friend Moszkowski reported him in 1922 to have said, “Young as I was, the remembrance of this occurrence never left me.” His biographer Seelig wrote in 1954 that the compass to this day is vividly engraved in his memory, because it practically bewitched him. In his autobiography, written at the age of sixty-seven, we read: “I can still remember –or at least I believe I can remember–that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”

This scene is most suggestive. There is the mysterious invariance or constancy of the compass needle, ever returning to the same direction, despite the fact that the needle seems free from any action-by-contact of the kind that is usually unconsciously invoked to explain the behavior of material things; despite the vagaries of motion one may arbitrarily impose on the case of the compass from the outside; and regardless of personal will or external Zwang or chaos. If Einstein remembered it so well and referred to it so often, it may be because the episode is an allegory of the formation of the play-ground of his basic imagination. (Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought).

–Exercise. There is no need to understand all the features of mystory, wide image, heuretics, popcycle, before beginning the discovery and design project. We may begin with a memory exercise, to notice what scene remains in memory. The instructions are just to reflect for a few minutes on one’s early childhood, to observe what may appear, to take note, to save the scene for development later on. Record the memory in anecdote form (300-word flash fiction) illustrated with found images. The exercise may also be applied analytically to biographies of interest. We will inventory a number of cases of such early memories.

WIDE IMAGE

1) The Writing of the Disaster. In Konsult egents articulate or reoccupy (retrieve) the conventions of microcosm/macrocosm by which pre-modern peoples oriented themselves (determined their EPS): As above, so below (one’s fate was written in the stars, and to read it one consulted oracles and astrologers). A contemporary version shifts from vertical to horizontal dynamics: As without, so within, The historical collective and the individual person become mutually intelligible when articulated in the proportional analogy of hypotyposis (The Writing of the Disaster/In Me). Such is the conceit of this genre organizing pedagogy in the digital apparatus. The guiding idea of Project #1 (heuretics of Konsult) is an encounter between egents and disaster, in which egents translate their image of wide scope (Wide Image) into a diagram, to function as an original hypothesis addressing the impasse (aporia) of Disaster.

–Mystory. In order to undertake Project #1, egents first must engage the nested Project #2, Mystory. Mystory is a genre for finding/designing an Image of Wide Scope (Wide Image; WI). We will devote considerable attention to this genre, which is the core of electrate pedagogy. The first insight is that electracy does not shift the disciplinary curriculum of literacy but rather the pedagogy. The rationale for this shift comes from Gerald Holton, history of science, argued in such books as Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Harvard, 1988). Holton notes that the practice of science (and all productive knowing) includes three primary dimensions, of which two are routinely taught while third remains latent, implicit. Discipline learning is organized around verification (knowledge after it is discovered or invented): making as techne, which is considered to be teachable. Techne as practice includes empirical facts (materially tested); and analytical tools. The third dimension (not taught or considered not teachable) also operates nonetheless, Holton insists. It is the dimension of discovery, creativity, which Holton calls thematic– making as poiesis. The empirical and analytical are objectively present in the disciplinary institution; the thematic is subjectively personal to the egent. Its origin is one’s disposition, a unique mix of nature and nurture, referring to one’s state of mind or attunement, attitude. Holton approaches the history of science from the side of themata, existing as archetypes in the history of thought and patterns of imagination specific to individuals. They are not provable, but are the source of hypotheses. Here is a key: Disposition generates original hypothesis.

–From Disposition to Hypothesis. The first lesson from Holton is to track this relation between disposition and hypothesis, since it establishes exactly the place of the Arts and Letters archive in electrate pedagogy as creativity. The insight to register for now is that disposition is precisely the concern of much of Philosophy, especially Continental thought, as in Heidegger’s question of how things stand with me, with us, Dasein (there-being) and Ereignis (collective enowning of event). Underlying Existential Positioning Systems is Existential Phenomenology, for example. The import for curriculum is that inquiry into disposition draws upon the traditions of Philosophy. The Image of Wide Scope designed through mystory puts into form and brings to expression egent’s disposition. Similarly, the best resource for learning how to formulate and translate this disposition into hypothesis is through study of literature (transmedia). The authority here is Northrop Frye, who in Anatomy of Criticism stated that literature and fiction as such are hypothetical. In short, this thematic dimension of science (of knowing) opens onto the Humanities (Arts and Letters) disciplines, locating the frontier articulating “the two cultures.”

–Albert Camus, Lyrical Essays. Holton observed in his study of revolutionary science that the work of individual creators manifested a pattern organized around a few (four to five) images (the Wide Image). Albert Camus anticipated this insight in reflecting on his own career, commenting on the reissue of his early collection of essays, The Wrong Side and the Right Side, which serves as an epigraph for mystory.

Nothing prevents one from dreaming, in the very hour of exile, since at least I know this, with sure and certain knowledge: a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. This is why, perhaps, after working and producing for twenty years, I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun. (Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 17).